The Witching Hour

by Anne Rice

  "I'm Guy Mayfair, Andrea's son, and this is my wife, Stephanie, she's Grady's daughter. She was Ellie's first cousin."

  She wanted to respond, was clasping each hand enough, was nodding enough? Was kissing back the old woman who kissed her enough? Another man was talking to her but his voice was too soft. He was old, he was saying something about Sheffield. The coffin was twenty feet away at most. She didn't dare look up, or look away from them, for fear she'd see it accidentally.

  But this is what you came for, and you have to do it. And they are here, hundreds of them ...

  "Rowan," said someone to her left, "this is Fielding Mayfair, Clay's son." Such a very old man, so old she could see all the bones of his skull through his pale skin, see the lower and upper teeth and the ridges around his sunken eyes. They were holding him up; he couldn't stand by himself, and all this struggle, so that he might see her? She put out her hand. "He wants to kiss you, honey." She brushed his cheek with her lips.

  His speech was low, his eyes yellowed as he looked up at her. She tried to hear what he was saying, something about Lestan Mayfair and Riverbend. What was Riverbend? She nodded. He was too old to be treated badly. She had to say something! He was too old to be struggling like this just to pay his respects to her. When she squeezed his hand, it felt so smooth and silky and knotted and strong.

  "I think she's going to faint," someone whispered. Surely they weren't talking about her.

  "Do you want me to take you up to the coffin?" The young man again, the handsome one, with the clean preppie face, and the brilliant eyes. "I'm Pierce, I met you just a second ago." Flash of perfect teeth. "Ellie's first cousin."

  Yes, to the coffin. It's time, isn't it? She looked towards it, and it seemed that someone stepped back so that she might see, and then her eyes shifted instantly upwards, beyond the face on the propped-up pillow. She saw the flowers clustered about the raised lid, a whole jungle of flowers, and far to the right at the foot of the coffin a white-haired man she knew. The dark-haired woman beside him was crying, and saying her rosary, and they were both looking at her, but how in the world could she possibly know that man, or anyone here? But she knew him! She knew he was English, whoever he was, she knew just how his voice would sound when he spoke to her.

  Jerry Lonigan helped her step forward. The handsome one, Pierce, was standing beside her. "She's sick, Monty," said the pretty old woman. "Get her some water."

  "Honey, maybe you should sit down ... "

  She shook her head, mouthing the word no. She looked at that white-haired Englishman again, the one with the woman who was praying. Ellie had wanted her rosary in the last week. Rowan had had to go to a store in San Francisco to buy one. The woman was shaking her head and crying, and wiping her nose, and the white-haired man was whispering to her, but his eyes were fixed on Rowan. I know you. He looked at her as if she'd spoken to him, and then it came to her--the cemetery in Sonoma County where Graham and Ellie were buried, this was the man she had seen that day by the grave. I know your family in New Orleans. And quite unexpectedly another piece of the same puzzle fell into place. This was the man who'd been standing outside Michael's house two nights ago on Liberty Street.

  "Honey, do you want a glass of water?" said Jerry Lonigan.

  But how could that be? How could that man have been there, and here, and what had all this to do with Michael, who had described to her the house with the iron roses in the railing?

  Pierce said he would go get a chair. "Let her just sit right here."

  She had to move. She couldn't just remain here staring at the white-haired Englishman, demanding of him that he explain himself, explain what he'd been doing on Liberty Street. And out of the corner of her eye, something she couldn't bear to see, something in the coffin waiting.

  "Here, Rowan, this is nice and cold." Smell of wine. "Take a drink, darling."

  I would like to, I really would, but I can't move my mouth. She shook her head, tried to smile. I don't think I can move my hand. And you are all expecting me to move, I really should move. She used to think the doctors who fainted at an autopsy were fools, really. How could such a thing affect one so physically? If you hit me with a baseball bat, I might pass out. Oh, God, what you don't know about life is really just beginning to reveal itself in this room. And your mother is in that coffin.

  What did you think, that she would wait here, alive, until you came? Until you finally realized ... Down here, in this strange land! Why, this is like another country, this.

  The white-haired Englishman came towards her. Yes, who are you? Why are you here? Why are you so dramatically and grotesquely out of place? But then again, he wasn't. He was just like all of them, the inhabitants of this strange land, so decorous and so gentle, and not a touch of irony or self-consciousness or false sentiment in his kindly face. He drew close to her, gently making the handsome young man give way.

  Remember those tortured faces at Ellie's funeral. Not a one under sixty yet not a gray hair, not a sagging muscle. Nothing like this. Why, this is what they mean when they talk about "the people."

  She lowered her eyes. Banks of flowers on either side of the velvet prie-dieu. She moved forward, her nails digging into Mr. Lonigan before she could stop herself. She struggled to relax her hand and to her utter amazement, she felt she was going to fall. The Englishman took hold of her left arm, as Mr. Lonigan held her by the right one.

  "Rowan, listen to me." said the Englishman softly in her ear, in that clipped yet melodious accent. "Michael would be here if he could. I'm here in Michael's place. Michael will come tonight. Just as soon as he can."

  She looked at him. shocked, the relief almost making her shudder. Michael was coming. Michael was somewhere close. But how could this be?

  "Yes, very close, and unavoidably detained," he said, as sincerely as if he'd invented the words "and truly put out that he cannot be here ... "

  She saw the dim dark featureless First Street house again, the house Michael had been talking about all that time. And when she'd first seen him in the water, he had looked like a tiny speck of clothes floating on the surface, that can't be a drowned man, not out here, miles and miles from the land ...

  "What can I do for you now?" said the Englishman, his voice low and secretive and utterly solicitous. "Do you want to step up to the coffin?"

  Yes, please, take me up. Please help me! Make my legs move. But they were moving. He had slipped his arm around her and he was guiding her, so easily, and the conversation had started up again, thank God, though it was a low respectful hum, from which she could extract various threads at will. " ... she just didn't want to come to the funeral parlor, that's the truth of it. She's furious that we're all here." "Keep quiet, she's ninety if she's a day and it's a hundred degrees outside." "I know, I know. Well, everyone can come to my place afterwards, I told you ... "

  She kept her eyes down, on the silver handles, on the flowers, on the velvet kneeler right in front of her now. Sick again. Sick from the heat and this motionless cool air with the scent of the flowers hanging around her like an invisible mist. But you have to do this. You have to do it calmly and quietly. You cannot lose it. Promise me you'll never go back there, you'll never try to find out.

  The Englishman was holding her, Michael will come, his right hand comfortingly against her arm, his left hand steadying her left wrist as she touched the velvet-covered side of the casket.

  Slowly, she forced herself to look up from the floor, to raise her eyes until she saw the face of the dead woman lying right there on the satin pillow. And slowly her mouth began to open, to pull open, the rigidity shifting into a spasm. She struggled with all her strength to keep from opening her mouth. She clenched her teeth. And the shudder that passed through her was so violent that the Englishman tightened his grip. He too was looking down. He had known her!

  Look at her. Nothing else matters now. It is not important to hurry, or to think of anything else, or to worry. Just look at her, look at her face with all its secrets
locked away now forever.

  And Stella's face was so beautiful in the coffin. She had such beautiful black hair ...

  "She is going to faint, help her! Pierce, help her."

  "No, we have her, she's all right," said Jerry Lonigan.

  So perfectly, hideously dead she looked, and so lovely. Groomed she was for eternity--with the pink lipstick gleaming on her shapely mouth and the rouge on the flawless girlish cheeks, and her black hair brushed out on the satin, like girl's hair, free and beautiful, and the rosary beads, yes, rosary beads, threaded through her fingers, which are like dough as they lie on her breast, not human hands at all, but something made crudely by a sculptor.

  In all these years, Rowan had never seen such a thing. She had seen them drowned, and stabbed, and after they had died on the wards in their sleep. She had seen them colorless and pumped with chemicals, slit open after weeks and months and even years, for the anatomy lesson. She had seen them at the autopsy with the bloodred organs being lifted out in the doctor's gloved hands.

  But never this. Never this dead and pretty thing in blue silk and lace, smelling of face powder, with her hands clasped over the rosary beads. Ageless she looked, almost like a giant little girl with her innocent hair, her face devoid of lines, even the shiny lipstick the color of rose petals.

  Oh, if it were only possible to open her eyes! I wish I could see my mother's eyes! And in this room filled with the very old, she is so young still ...

  She bent down. She withdrew her hands ever so gently from the Englishman. She laid them on her pale hands, her softly melting hands. Hard! Hard as the rosary beads. Cold and hard. She closed her eyes, and pressed her fingers into this unyielding white flesh. So absolutely dead, so beyond any breath of life, so firmly finished.

  If Michael were here, could he know from her hands if she had died without pain or fear? Could he know why the secrecy? Could he touch this horrid, lifeless flesh and hear the song of life still from it? Oh, please God, whoever she was, why ever she gave me away, I hope it was without fear and pain that she died. In peace, in a sweetness like her face. Look at her closed eyes, her smooth forehead.

  Slowly, she raised her hand and wiped the tears off her own cheek, and realized that her face was relaxed now. That she could speak if she wanted to, and that others around her were crying too, that the woman with the iron gray hair was crying, and that the poor black-haired woman who had been crying all along was sobbing silently against the chest of the man beside her, and that the faces of those who didn't cry--everywhere she looked in the glow beyond the coffin--had become thoughtful and quiet, and rather like those faces in great Florentine paintings where the passive, faintly sad souls regard the world beyond the frame as if from a dream, gazing out from the corners of their eyes, languidly.

  She backed away, but her eyes remained fixed on the woman in the coffin. She let the Englishman guide her again, away, to a small room that waited. Mr. Lonigan was saying it was time for them all to come up one by one, that the priest was here, and he was ready.

  In astonishment, Rowan saw a tall old man bend gracefully and kiss the dead woman's forehead. Beatrice, the pretty one with the gray hair, came next and whispered something as she kissed the dead woman in the same manner. A child was lifted next to do the same; and the old bald man came, heavy with his big belly making it hard, but he bent to give the kiss, whispering hoarsely for everyone to hear, "Good-bye, darlin'."

  Mr. Lonigan pushed her gently down in the chair. As he turned, the crying woman with the black hair suddenly bent near and looked into her eyes. "She didn't want to give you up," she said, her voice so thin and quick it was like a thought.

  "Rita Mae!" Mr. Lonigan hissed, turning on her, taking her by the arm, and drawing her back.

  "Is that true?" Rowan whispered. Rowan reached out to capture her retreating hand. Mr. Lonigan's face flushed, his jowls shivering slightly. He pushed the black-haired woman away, out of the door, down a small hallway.

  The Englishman looked down at her from the door to the big room. He gave her a little nod, his eyebrows rising as if it filled him with sadness and wondering.

  Slowly Rowan withdrew her gaze from him. She stared at the procession, still coming one by one, each bending as if to drink from the cool splash of a low water fountain. "Good-bye, Deirdre, dear." Did they all know? Did they all remember, the older ones, the ones who had come up to her at first? Had all the children heard, in one form or another, at some time or another? The handsome one was watching her from far away.

  "Good-bye, sweetheart ... " On and on they came, seemingly without end, the rooms behind them dark and crowded as the line pressed in tighter.

  Didn't want to give you up.

  What must it feel like to kiss her smooth hard skin? And they did it as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the simplest thing in the world, the baby held aloft, the mother bending, the man coming so quick and then another very old one with spotted hands and thinning hair, "Help me up, Cecil," her foot on the velvet prie-dieu. The twelve-year-old with the hair ribbon stood on tiptoe.

  "Rowan, do you want to be alone with her again?" Lonigan's voice. "That's your time at the end, when they've all passed. The priest will wait. But you don't have to."

  She looked into the Englishman's mild, gray eyes. But he wasn't the one who'd spoken. It was Lonigan with his flushed and shining face, and china blue eyes. Far down the little hallway stood his wife, Rita Mae, not daring now to come closer.

  "Yes, alone, one more time," Rowan whispered. Her eyes searched out the eyes of Rita Mae, in the shadows at the end of the little hall. "True," Rita Mae mouthed the word, as she nodded gravely.

  Yes. To kiss her good-bye, yes, the way they are kissing her ...

  Twenty-five

  THE FILE ON THE MAYFAIR WITCHES

  PART X

  Rowan Mayfair

  STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL THIS SUMMARY AND UPDATED 1989

  SEE CONFIDENTIAL FILE: ROWAN MAYFAIR, LONDON, FOR ALL

  RELATED MATERIALS.

  COMPUTER PASSWORD REQUIRED.

  Rowan Mayfair was adopted legally by Ellen Louise Mayfair and her husband Graham Franklin, on the date of Rowan's birth, November 7, 1959.

  At this point Rowan was taken by plane to Los Angeles, where she lived with her adopted parents until she was three years old. The family then moved to San Francisco, California, where they lived in Pacific Heights for two years.

  When Rowan was five, the family made its final move to a house on the shore of Tiburon, California--across the bay from San Francisco--which had been designed by architects Trammel, Porter and Davis expressly for Graham and Ellie and their daughter. The house is a marvel of glass walls, exposed redwood beams, and modern plumbing fixtures and appliances. It includes enormous decks, its own twenty-five-foot pier, and a boat channel, which is dredged twice yearly. It commands a view of Sausalito across Richardson Bay and San Francisco to the south. Rowan lives alone in this house now.

  At the time of this writing, Rowan is almost thirty years old. She is five feet ten inches tall. She has short, softly bobbed blond hair and large pale gray eyes. She is undeniably attractive, with remarkably beautiful skin, and dark straight eyebrows and dark eyelashes and an extremely beautiful mouth. Yet for the sake of comparison, it can be said that she has none of the glamour of Stella, or the sweet prettiness of Antha, or the dark sensuality of Deirdre. Rowan is delicate yet boyish; in some of her pictures, her expression--on account of her straight dark eyebrows--is reminiscent of Mary Beth.

  It is my belief that she resembles Petyr van Abel, but there are definite differences. She does not have his deep-set eyes, and her blond hair is ashen rather than gold. But her face is narrow like that of Petyr van Abel; and there is a Nordic look to Rowan, just as there is to Petyr in his portraits.

  Rowan appears cold to people. Yet her voice is warm, and deep and slightly husky--what is called a whiskey voice in America. People say you have to know her, really, to like her. This is stran
ge because our investigation indicates that very few people know her. But she is almost universally liked.

  SUMMARY OF MATERIALS ON ROWAN'S ADOPTIVE PARENTS ELLIE MAYFAIR AND GRAHAM FRANKLIN

  Ellen Louise Mayfair was the only daughter of Sheffield, son of Cortland Mayfair. She was born in 1923, and six years old when Stella died. Ellie lived in California almost exclusively from the time that she entered Stanford University at eighteen years of age. She married Graham Franklin, a Stanford law graduate, when she was thirty-one. Graham was eight years younger than Ellie. Ellie seems to have had very little contact with her family even before she went to California, as she went away to a boarding school in Canada when she was only eight, six months after her mother's death.

  Her father, Sheffield Mayfair, seems never to have recovered from the loss of his wife, and though he visited Ellie often, taking her on shopping sprees in New York, he kept her away from home. He was the most quiet and reclusive of Cortland's sons, and possibly the most disappointing, in that he worked doggedly in the family firm but seldom excelled or participated in important decisions. Everyone depended upon him, Cortland said after his death.

  What is relevant here is that after the age of eight, Ellie saw very little of the Mayfairs, and her lifelong friends in California were people she had met there, along with a few girls from the Canadian boarding school with whom she kept in touch. We don't know what she knew of Antha's life and death, or even of Deirdre's life.

  Her husband, Graham Franklin, knew nothing about Ellie's family apparently, and some of the remarks he made over the years are entirely fanciful. "She came from a great plantation down there." "They are the sort of people who keep gold under the floorboards." "I think they were probably descended from the buccaneers." "Oh, my wife's people? They were slave traders, weren't they, honey? They all have colored blood."

  Family gossip at the time of the adoption said that Ellie had signed papers for Carlotta Mayfair saying she would never let Rowan discover anything about her true background, and never permit her to return to Louisiana.